A School on the Green: Two Accounts of Canterbury, 1833

Reform Comes to Canterbury

1In the 1830s, reformers in the North worked on many causes at once. Public school reformers wanted free schools for all children, yet in many Northern towns Black children were kept out of the schools or sent to separate, poorer ones. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, who printed the newspaper The Liberator in Boston, believed schools for Black students would help fight both slavery and prejudice. And for women, who could not vote, teaching was one of the few respected jobs open to them.

2In 1831 Prudence Crandall, a young teacher raised in a Quaker family, opened a boarding school for girls in her house on the green in Canterbury. Local families sent their daughters. In the fall of 1832 she admitted Sarah Harris, the daughter of a Black farmer in town, who hoped to become a teacher. Some white parents objected and took their daughters out of the school.

3Crandall then made a bolder choice. In March 1833 an advertisement in The Liberator announced that she would reopen her school for "young ladies and little misses of color." By April, Black students from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York were arriving. A town meeting voted to protest, led by Andrew Judson, a lawyer and town leader. In May 1833 Connecticut's legislature passed a law, often called the "Black Law," that banned schools from teaching Black students from other states without a town's permission.

4Crandall kept teaching and was arrested in June 1833. She spent a night in the county jail. Arthur Tappan, a wealthy New York abolitionist, paid for her lawyers. Her first trial ended without a verdict, and a second jury convicted her. In July 1834 the state's highest court overturned the conviction because of a technical error, without deciding whether the law itself was allowed under the Constitution.

5Meanwhile some neighbors refused to sell her goods, and vandals damaged the house. On the night of September 9, 1834, a group of men attacked the house and broke many of its windows. Fearing for her students' safety, Crandall closed the school. Connecticut repealed the Black Law in 1838. In 1886, near the end of her life, the state legislature voted Crandall a yearly pension, and in 1995 Connecticut named her its state heroine.